Zeppo, p.7
Zeppo, page 7
Betty told Groucho’s biographer Hector Arce, “I think Ruth discovered that perhaps Zeppo didn’t count for much in the act. She was using her head. She may have liked Zeppo better at first, but she discovered Zeppo wasn’t making as much money as Groucho. When Groucho went for her, I didn’t see that Zeppo was broken-hearted.” It was an early example of Zeppo’s growing resentment about his status as a salaried employee of his brothers. When he replaced Gummo he was not given an equal share of the act. To be fair, he joined one of the most successful acts in vaudeville and did not build that success from nothing as his brothers had. But now his financial standing in the act was costing him girls. Zeppo may not have seemed broken-hearted to Betty, but his pride would not have allowed him to show his feelings on the rejection.
Zeppo’s previous dance partner was petite. The February 7, 1919, Variety review called her, “Little Gene Maddox.” Zeppo told Barry Norman in the BBC interview that “she weighed about 102 or 103 pounds and the dance that I did was acrobatics and I’d throw her around and I’d catch her and all of that.” Ruth was the right size to be Zeppo’s dance partner in the beginning, but from his comments in that interview sixty years after Ruth dumped him for Groucho, it seems Zeppo may have never gotten over the slight. What he remembered most about Ruth was her weight.
It seems like she didn’t eat too much before she met me and kept putting on weight and of course finally she got pregnant. Now she’s up to 135 and I’m pretty strong . . . but to lift her up in the air . . . and then throw her around and put her legs around my waist, and spin very fast, it was getting more difficult all the time. But I couldn’t say anything. Groucho had married her and now she was up to around 145. It was ridiculous. It finally got so she couldn’t get her legs around my waist to hold on with her feet when I’d spin her. I was constantly after Groucho to let me get another girl. But she wanted to do the dance. I got very angry. I was the younger brother. I didn’t have that much to say, although it was my number. So, I spun her one day and—I think she got up to 150 pounds—and I spun her so hard that she couldn’t hold on and she flew out . . . across the stage and into the orchestra pit. That finished her. . . . and I got another partner.
To add to Zeppo’s frustration, Gene Maddox rejoined the act in January 1920, but Ruth kept her spot in the dance number with Zeppo. According to Hector Arce, Harpo one day suggested that the modestly talented Ruth be replaced. “‘The girl stays,’ Groucho snapped. ‘I’m going to marry her.’” Ruth and Groucho were married on February 4, 1920. The Marx family had moved back to New York in November 1919 and Groucho and Ruth returned to Chicago to be married at the home of Ruth’s mother and stepfather. It was hastily arranged to fit into a break before they started a western tour. Minnie and Frenchy were vacationing in Florida, and the few surviving photos of the day don’t show any of the groom’s brothers in attendance.2 Writer Jo Swerling was the best man. Variety reported, on February 6, “Julius Marx (Four Marx Bros.) is to be married this week in Chicago to Ruth Terrel, non-professional.” The fact is that she had been dancing in the act for a few months. And Variety used her stage name—which randomly alternated between Terrel and Tyrell—in the report. If calling Ruth “non-professional” was an inside joke, Zeppo probably laughed loudest.
When she became pregnant, Ruth was probably no longer being whirled around the stage by Zeppo, who may have been exaggerating about her with the benefit of sixty years of hindsight and being one of the last survivors from the act at the time of the BBC interview. He may also be conflating the incident with a very similar one, that featured neither him nor Ruth, that was documented in the New York Sun on May 20, 1919—several months before Ruth joined the act.
Yesterday at the Palace, two of the cutups in the act of the Four Marx Brothers, ‘N’ Everything, did a swan dive off the stage, making a beautiful landing on the head of one of the musicians. As it seemed to be the kind of head designed to break falls, they arose unhurt without even their reputations damaged. The accident befell Arthur Marx, the red headed clown of the company, and Gene Maddox, who’s a girl. The pair were whirling about in a dance, shaking the shimmy so violently that in a moment they had slipped into the trough of the stage, several footlights had popped out—raising the expense of the production enormously—and they had popped off the stage in the most offhand manner.
It is entirely possible that two different dancers in the Marx company were thrown into the orchestra pit during the 1919–1920 season by two different Marx Brothers, but it is more likely that Zeppo borrowed the story about Harpo and Gene Maddox to fit with his “Ruth was fat” narrative. But that wasn’t even the most unflattering thing he said about her in the BBC interview. Asked about Ruth’s relationship with Groucho, Zeppo said,
She was very stupid, and it was difficult for Groucho to tolerate stupidity. He liked bright people and at the beginning, of course, it must have been sexual attraction . . . because it couldn’t have been mental. She was not bright, and I guess they had regular quarrels that married people have. . . . I don’t think Groucho was the easiest man to live with. . . . He put people down, especially a woman like that who was stupid.
Zeppo acknowledged that losing Ruth to Groucho caused some strain in his relationship with Groucho, but only for a short time. The dancing became tougher for Ruth in the aftermath of moving on to Groucho. Zeppo was rough with her and hoped she would voluntarily give up the dance spot. This, probably more than anything else, got Zeppo his next dance partner. In Son of Groucho, Arthur Marx—also Ruth’s son—wrote,
Like his brothers, Zeppo could never be very serious on stage and when he discovered that Mother didn’t have much of a sense of humor, he used to take great delight in finding ways to torment her. For example, when Zeppo realized that my mother couldn’t extricate herself from a back-bend position very gracefully under her own power, he’d let her struggle with the problem herself for what seemed like an interminable length of time before he’d condescendingly pull her to her feet. This was embarrassing to Mother, and at the conclusion of their act there would be an unpleasant scene in the wings.
The backstage battles continued, and Groucho frequently had to make tentative peace between his new wife and youngest brother. Zeppo had reasons other than Ruth’s dancing and her romantic rejection of him to be unhappy. He’d been the fourth Marx Brother for more than two years and was still trying to make something more out of Gummo’s part than was ever intended. But his situation would soon improve.
With their return to New York in the fall of 1919, bookings were primarily kept close enough to home that the Marxes were able to live in their own apartments for a few months. The temporary elimination of lengthy train rides reduced some of the backstage tension. After a short tour of New England and upstate New York, the Four Marx Brothers rang in 1920 with a month of performances in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Newark before embarking on an Orpheum circuit tour that would start in the Midwest and take them to the West Coast. Newlyweds Ruth and Groucho honeymooned on the tour. Zeppo recovered from losing Ruth quickly as he joined Harpo and the married but wandering Chico in pursuit of young female vaudeville fans across the country.
Zeppo explained three-sheeting, a common vaudeville technique for meeting women, to Barry Norman in the BBC interview. A three-sheet was a large poster used in the front of theaters that listed the acts on the bill.
When you’re outside of theatres you see these posters with the names of the people . . . and we go out after the show . . . we get dressed quickly and go out and stand by these three-sheets and when the girls pass by, of course some of them nodded. That was all that was necessary.
In his vaudeville memoir, Much Ado About Me, Fred Allen discussed three-sheeting: “Many good-looking vaudeville actors, after each matinee, dressed hurriedly and rushed out to stand in front as the audience left the theater. As the girls came out, the male peacock preened himself, hoping to catch the attention of one of the corn-fed belles.”
When three-sheeting didn’t yield results, Zeppo shared an alternative source for female companionship on the road. “We’d always wind up in a whorehouse. Chico played the piano, and Harpo would do something, and Groucho would sing, and they loved us. These hookers, they just loved us—and usually for free. We entertained them, and they’d come see the show all the time. That was part of our routine.” At least in the early days of his marriage, Groucho took his vows more seriously than Chico, so while touring with his new wife in the company, Groucho reduced the Marx Brothers’ whorehouse act to a trio.
If the act on stage sometimes also seemed like a trio, it was because Zeppo had little beyond straight lines, his dance number, and a few songs in the show. But by 1921 he could be considered a vaudeville veteran, having the season with the Juvenile Six under his belt as well as nearly three years with the Four Marx Brothers. He had learned a lot and had talent that was not being utilized. He explained his acceptance of the situation to Barry Norman:
I wanted to be a comedian and there wasn’t an opportunity at all for me to be a comic. They had a very difficult time getting funny stuff for three boys. . . . If I thought of a good joke or thought of a good piece of business, I would contribute that, but I felt frustrated because I couldn’t do the things that I was thinking up for them to do, and rightly so. I didn’t resent it at all. But every time I walked out on the stage, I felt I was cheating because I wasn’t doing a good job. . . . I also had the feeling that they were carrying me along because I was their brother.
Groucho summed up Zeppo’s role in brutally frank terms in The Marx Bros. Scrapbook: “He was a funny guy off stage, but he wasn’t a funny guy on stage. He was the juvenile, and the juvenile doesn’t have any funny lines. In the plot, he’s supposed to fuck the leading lady, the young girl. Zeppo was the romantic lead. That’s all.”
Jack Benny, who toured with the Marx Brothers in 1920 when he was still calling himself Ben K. Benny, roomed with Zeppo on the road and spoke of him in an interview with Richard J. Anobile for The Marx Bros. Scrapbook:
Zeppo was the kind of fellow who was always funny at parties. But when he was with the team, he ended up with all the straight material. He never had an opportunity to find out if he could be funny on stage. Maybe he could have been, but he never had a chance to prove it. But to me, Zeppo off stage was like Groucho on stage.
Benny and Zeppo spent a lot of their offstage time together during that 1920 Orpheum tour, and one incident has taken on a life of its own, having been told and retold so frequently that each new version became less accurate than the one before. It was customary for prominent Jewish families to invite Jewish vaudevillians passing through their towns to their homes for a traditional Friday night sabbath dinner. When the tour came to Vancouver for the week of March 8, 1920, local businessman David Marcowitz invited the Marx Brothers to his home. Only Zeppo took him up on the offer, and he brought Jack Benny with him. The youngest of the three Marcowitz children, fourteen-year-old Sadya (later anglicized to Sadie Marks) would marry Jack seven years later. She would eventually change her name to Mary Livingstone and become his onstage partner.
Writing in the March 1945 issue of Radio Mirror, Mary told her version of the story. “Zeppo Marx, leaving the vaudeville theater where Jack and the Marx Brothers were sharing top billing to call on my older sister, Babe, thought he would have some fun when Jack—a stranger in town and lonesome—asked him if his date had a sister. ‘Sure thing,’ replied Zeppo invitingly, ‘and a looker!’ Jack came along expecting a date with a gorgeous girl and his ‘date’ turned out to be me!” In the posthumously published memoir Sunday Nights at Seven, completed by his daughter Joan, Jack Benny recalled the fateful evening.
Zeppo, the youngest brother, talked me into going to this party. He said he knew some fascinating Vancouver girls and it would be wild, with Canadian ale, Canadian rye, Canadian women and Canadian whoopee. I told him I didn’t like wild parties and I didn’t like wild women. He talked me into going with him.
We drove to a large frame house on the outskirts of the city. When we entered, much to my relief, we were in a nice family home. Zeppo’s wild party was just in his imagination. It was his idea of a put-on—I would expect a wild evening and be disappointed. Instead, it was Zeppo who was disappointed in my reaction.”3
Under various titles, the Four Marx Brothers had been starring in Home Again since the fall of 1914. The act in 1920 may have been called ‘N’ Everything, but the reality was that it was Home Again with new songs. Harpo may have invented new sight gags from time to time, and Groucho and Chico occasionally worked their best ad libs into the show; but other than the songs and the fourth Marx Brother, not much had changed since 1914. Zeppo seamlessly replaced Gummo and Home Again, the reliable vehicle created for them by Al Shean, rolled on. By 1921 they all thought it was time for a new show. (They’d thought that in 1918, but the failure of The Cinderella Girl led them right back to Home Again.) In the past, Minnie had even placed advertisements looking for a suitable new script for the Marx Brothers. It would ultimately come from another vaudeville veteran who had appeared on several bills with them in the past.
Herman Timberg’s vaudeville career started in 1906 when he was a child performer in the original Gus Edwards school act. (The early Marx act “Fun in Hi Skule” was one of the many imitations of this act.) By 1919 Timberg was moving away from performing and started a production business with a well-known partner financing him: lightweight boxing champion Benny Leonard. Timberg had worked on a bill with the Marx Brothers as recently as December 1920 and was very familiar with their act. He also had a keen eye for talent, and it was obvious to him that Zeppo was underutilized. With financing from Benny Leonard, and the Marx Brothers in the market for a new show, Timberg wrote On the Mezzanine Floor.
The opening scene was a revelation. In a theatrical manager’s office, Zeppo outlines a show he wants to produce as Groucho, Harpo, and Chico each arrive at the office to audition, disrupting Zeppo’s pitch. For the first time the Marx Brothers truly function as a quartet of equals. Zeppo has an opportunity to be funny, delivering snappy dialogue and getting a few good laughs. He isn’t overshadowing any of his brothers, but he has clearly graduated to a role that was simply way beyond Gummo’s capabilities. Fast patter—in this case entirely in rhyme—would not have been written for an actor with a stammer, and that scene had a lot of it. Had material like this been offered to them before Zeppo was in the act, another member of the cast would have been pitching the idea to the manager and Gummo may have opened the door to the office before disappearing into the background until the next song or dance.4
The final performance of ‘N’ Everything on January 22, 1921, at Keith’s 81st Street Theatre in New York was followed by three weeks of rehearsal and the premiere of On the Mezzanine Floor at Poli’s Capitol Theatre in Hartford, Connecticut, on February 14. In early April, the Four Marx Brothers filmed their ill-fated movie debut. They starred in a never-released two-reel short called “Humor Risk,” which seems not to have survived. They had a lot more confidence in the new show and their partnership with Herman Timberg. The Marxes’ new producer Benny Leonard appeared in the show on opening night and would make additional guest appearances on the road when his fight schedule permitted. Timberg developed a bit of business in which the champ sparred with the Four Marx Brothers. This routine had to be modified after the first performance. According to Kyle Crichton, Zeppo “clipped Benny so smartly with a right cross that Mr. Leonard was enraged.” The bit quickly became Benny Leonard sparring with three Marx Brothers while Zeppo played the referee. Buster Marx was still good with his fists.
CHAPTER SIX
A Guy Could Get Used to This
ON THE MEZZANINE FLOOR REFRESHED THE ACT—IN LARGE PART DUE TO Zeppo’s expanded role. The show Zeppo pitches to Mr. Lee, the theatrical manager in the opening scene, comprises the rest of the show. A plot was never especially important in a Marx Brothers show. It was just a device upon which to hang the specialty numbers and routines. The admittedly slight story of the show within the show centers around Groucho’s character, Mr. Hammer, trying to marry off his oddly named son Quinine, played by Zeppo, to the daughter of a wealthy widow. Hammer claims to have arranged the marriage years before with the girl’s father. The girl inherited the hotel where the story unfolds. The premise that the girl must marry a musician is introduced and Quinine—who asks the girl to call him Bobby—can’t play an instrument. Hammer summons a pair of musicians from the local union and introduces them as his other sons. He calls Chico “Geshveer”—the Yiddish word for ulcer. Quinine proclaims his love for the girl, Dorothy, and wants to marry her. But Dorothy’s mother insists her daughter marry a musician, so Harpo is chosen as the groom after they see his harp solo. The hotel detective turns out to be Dorothy’s guardian and he is played by Ed Metcalfe, the actor who played the theatrical agent in the opening scene. At the finale, the detective breaks character and becomes Mr. Lee again. He proclaims that the plot of the show is terrible. The cast sings the finale, and the curtain comes down.
